How would you go about freezing a bullet in mid air?
There is the high enthusiast version, using a cameraAxe and a precise gate similar mechanisms; There is the cheapo version that uses the Hiviz kit and there the Air-Gap Flash.
All the strobes, flashes, monoblocks and heads the use on regular basis are built around a pushing energy into a xenon tube. It is fast. 1/40,000th of a second fast. But from a bullet point of view this is actually kind of slow. Think Matrix-bullet-time kinda thing. Only the bullet is their fast one.
Air-Gap Strobes use a different mechanism to produce light. They form an electric ark. The strobe juices the arc by discharging a 35,000 volt capacitor. This makes the Flux capacitor look like a triple A battery. And produces a light burst less than a 1/1,000,000th of a second long.
Maurice Ribble (who is the smarts behind CameraAxe) built one of those behemoth. It produces amazing-time-stopping photographs. It also can kill you.
You can find the complete instructions – for educational use only – along with the reason why you should not built one over at Maurice’s blog.
